1. Field of the Invention
The invention pertains in general to a high-resolution downhole scanning spectrometer that is suitable for downhole use and in particular, to a downhole spectrometer that employs spinning, oscillating, or stepping one or more optical interference filters to change the angle at which light passes through them to obtain a higher resolution measurement.
2. Summary of the Related Art
Oil companies take samples from formations to determine the characteristics of the formation. These samples are typically pumped from the formation and initially contain contaminants such as well bore fluid that have invaded the formation. Contaminated samples yield invalid results when trying to determine the properties of a hydrocarbon bearing formation. Thus, oil companies desire an accurate measure of sample contamination percentage in real time as they are pumping sample fluid from a formation so that they can decide when to divert a reasonably pure formation fluid sample into a collection tank. They do not want to pump unnecessarily long and waste very expensive rig time. Conversely, they do not want to pump too little and collect a useless sample. If the contamination is more than about 10%, the sample may be useless.
In such cases, the PVT properties measured in the lab cannot be corrected back to true reservoir conditions because of this excessive contamination. It is therefore necessary to perform measurements downhole to assess the sample contamination and associated merits of information regarding formation properties derived from the downhole sample. One method of investigation comprises using a spectrometer to perform optical measurements on the fluid samples as they are pumped through a sampling instrument and subsequently collected in a downhole environment.
Numerous factors affect downhole spectrometry measurements. In the down-hole environment, photodetectors are utilized and must operate at high ambient temperatures, thus, they are very noisy and generate very little signal. Moreover, dirty or contaminated samples of flowing streams of crude oil containing scatterers such as sand particles or gas bubbles tend to add noise to the system. These scatterers cause the optical spectrum to momentarily “jump” up, appearing darker as the scatterers pass through the sample cell. At high concentrations, these scatterers cause the measured spectrum to jump or rise up repeatedly. To first order, the scattering effect is just a momentary baseline offset. One way to eliminate baseline offset and greatly improve the signal-to-noise ratio of a downhole spectrometer is to collect the derivative of the spectra with respect to wavelength. Derivative spectra can be obtained by modulating the wavelength of light and using a lock-in amplifier.
It is commonplace for spectrometers to disperse white light into its constituent colors. The resulting rainbow of colors can be projected through a sample and onto a fixed array of photodetectors. Alternatively, by rotating a dispersive element (i.e. grating, prism), the rainbow can be mechanically scanned past a single photodetector one color at a time. In either case, an operator can obtain a sample's darkness versus wavelength, in other words, its spectrum.
Photodetectors and their amplifiers almost always have some thermal noise and drift, which limit the accuracy of a spectral reading. As operating temperature increases, noise and drift increase dramatically at the same time that photodetector signal becomes significantly weaker. If an operator oscillates the wavelength (color) of light about some center wavelength, then the operator can reject most photodetector and amplifier noise and drift by using an electronic bandpass filter, centered at the oscillation frequency. The operator can further reject noise by using a phase-sensitive (“lock-in”) amplifier that not only rejects signals having the wrong frequency but also rejects signals having the correct frequency but having no fixed phase relationship (indicative of noise) relative to the wavelength oscillation. A lock-in amplifier can improve signal to noise by as much as 100 db, which is a factor of 10100 db/10 or 10 billion.
The output of the lock-in amplifier used in this procedure is proportional to the root-mean-square (RMS) amplitude of that portion of the total signal, that portion being at the same frequency and having a fixed phase relationship relative to the optical frequency being observed. The more that the darkness of the sample changes with color, the larger importance this RMS value will have to the operator. In other words, the output of lock-in amplifier for a system with an oscillating-wavelength input is proportional to the derivative of the spectrum (with respect to wavelength) at the center wavelength of the oscillation.
U.S. Pat. No. 3,877,818, Photo-Optical Method for Determining Fat Content in Meat, issued Apr. 15, 1975, to Button et al. discloses an apparatus in which light reflected off the surface of a piece of meat passes through a lens and strikes an oscillating mirror. The angle of reflection of the light reflected off this mirror varies with the mirror's oscillation. Light reflected from the mirror strikes a stationary interference filter and onto a photodetector. The color transmitted through the interference filter varies slightly with the angle of incidence of the light beam striking it. Thus, the wavelength of radiation passing through the filter oscillates over a narrow range about the wavelength for fat absorption of meat and can be used to determine the fat content of the meat. Button et al. does not enable the possibility of a full rotation or control of the angular deviation.
Current down-hole “spectrometers” (for example, Schlumberger's Optical Fluid Analyzer (OFA) and Baker Atlas' SampleViewSM) utilize discrete filter photometers. Each optical channel is achieved by filtering light for each individual channel through an optical filter of a color corresponding to the optical channel. Therefore, the wavelength coverage of such a discrete spectrometer is not continuous, but discrete. The discrete spectrum has gaps that go from the center wavelength of one discrete optical filter to the center wavelength of the next discrete optical filter. These gaps can be large ones of 100 to 200 nm or more in wavelength coverage. The channels of such devices are broad. In the current down-hole spectrometer, all hydrocarbon peaks are lumped into one broad channel centered at 1740 nm, with a Full Width at Half Maximum (FWHM) of 32 nm.
The down-hole environment is difficult for operating sensors. Reasons include limited space within a tool's pressure housing, elevated temperatures, and the need to withstand shock and vibration. Components such as motors, interference filters, and photodiodes in the logging tools, are already fabricated and available to withstand temperature, shock and vibration of the downhole environment. Thus, it is possible to manufacture this spectrometer into a small enough package in order to squeeze into the available space inside the current SampleViewSM module.
For comparison, many laboratory spectrometers use a grating to disperse the light into its constituent colors. However, almost all gratings are an epoxy-on-glass replica of a master grating. These epoxy replicas soften and creep at high temperature, which causes a distortion in the spectrum and a loss in light intensity. Moreover, the price of an all-glass master grating ($50-100K) is prohibitively expensive.
Known laboratory spectrometers typically utilize Fourier Transform (FT) spectroscopy which are unsuitable for down-hole applications. FT spectrometers are large (2-3 feet long, 1-2 feet wide), heavy (200-300 lbs), mechanically and electronically complicated, and must maintain perfect alignment of all their optical components to work properly, which is why they are typically built on a very rigid framework. Thus, there is a need for a high-resolution spectrometer which is small enough and robust for operation in a downhole environment.